Psychology After Psychoanalysis

Psychosocial studies and beyond

Ian Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317683292
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

Ian Parker has been a leading light in the fields of critical and discursive psychology for over 25 years. The Psychology After Critique series brings together for the first time his most important papers. Each volume in the series has been prepared by Ian Parker and presents a newly written introduction and focused overview of a key topic area.

Psychology After Psychoanalysis, the fourth volume in the series, is about the impact of psychoanalysis on critical debates in psychology. It addresses three central questions:

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• Why is psychoanalysis re-emerging within psychology?

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• How can psychoanalytic ideas inform psychosocial research?

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• How does psychoanalysis explain the relation between the individual and society?

International in scope, the book includes a clear account of psychoanalysis, and the different varieties of the approach that are at work inside and outside the discipline of psychology. It explores the status of psychoanalysis as a series of concepts and as a methodology, and shows how its clinical practice is crucial to the way that it operates now in an academic context. In doing so, the book sheds light on the arguments currently occurring inside psychoanalysis, with discussion of its relation to critical psychology, psychosocial research, the health professions, culture and social theory.

Parker shows how psychoanalysis rests on a notion of 'method' that is very different from mainstream psychology, and unravels the implications of this difference. Early chapters examine the lines of debate between various psychoanalytical traditions, and show how critical psychology challenges the assumptions about human nature and subjectivity made in conventional psychoanalysis. Later chapters introduce the methodological device of 'transference' and explore how psychoanalysis may be utilized as a resource to review key questions of human culture.

Psychology After Psychoanalysis is essential reading for students and researchers in psychology, psychosocial studies, sociology, social anthropology and cultural studies, and to psychoanalysts of different traditions engaged in academic research.

1 Psychoanalytic theory and psychology Conditions of possibility for clinical and cultural practice

DOI: 10.4324/9781315774060-1

This first chapter provides a detailed review of the way different forms of psychoanalytic theory and methodology have emerged in recent years inside psychology. I look at the opportunities for critical work and also at the problems that psychoanalysis opens up for us. The key problem is that psychoanalysis, whatever its pretensions to provide a radical alternative to mainstream psychology, is in its practice at least still part of the ‘psycomplex’, and so it plays a powerful part in defining and regulating subjectivity.

Here I explore traditions of psychoanalysis, and pay some attention to the usual suspects that appear in psychology textbooks, such as Jung. But I am also concerned with traditions of work from within the clinical debates that will be less familiar to psychologists. These latter traditions of work are starting to appear in critical psychological research in the field of ‘psychosocial’ studies.

I review the important contribution that Kleinian and object-relations theory has made to methodological developments in research, but also draw attention to some of the dangers that this holds for those who are sceptical about the claims of psychoanalysis to provide a complete alternative ‘psychological’ approach. The danger is that it operates as a worldview which its adherents then evangelize about. I treat psychoanalysis here as a collection of forms of clinical practice and as an array of cultural representations of internal mental states and social relations. The theoretical focus is on the status of psychoanalysis as a form of knowledge (positioned alongside and in contradistinction to psychology), on the nature of knowledge in psychology (of others by practitioners and researchers), and of forms of popularized self-knowledge (including the relationship between that self-knowledge and professional claims). This opens the way to a critical engagement with psychoanalysis in different parts of the world.

What do psychoanalysis and psychology have in common? They both encompass conceptual practices that circulate around and attempt to comprehend individual subjectivity (Frosh, 1989). Psychoanalytic theory therefore immediately takes the discipline of psychology beyond a mere description of behaviour (still dominant traditions in US academic psychology). This ‘individual’ subjectivity is no automatic or universal function of human nature, and so we need to keep to the fore the constructionist argument that this subjectivity is something specific to a certain point in history and to particular parts of the world (Heelas and Lock, 1981). There are many different ways of characterizing this historical and geographical specificity, but it is possible to argue that this individual subjectivity flowered first with the birth of capitalism in Europe, though this claim needs to be modulated through a detailed analysis of the relationship between European capitalism and the ‘rest of the world’.

Not only is this individual subject circled around and reflected upon in the manifold discourses that comprise psychoanalytic and psychological traditions of thought, constituted at a certain time and place, but the point from which we (psychologists or psychoanalysts) conduct such inquiry is simultaneously constructed; the individual subjects (experimenters, researchers, theorists) who conduct the analysis of their target individual object/subject (selves, clients, patients) are the product of particular cultural and institutional conditions. The point from which the inquiry is conducted thus has a peculiar mirror-like relationship with the object of inquiry (a relationship that provides the basis of a number of reflexive ethical questions in psychoanalysis and psychology). One response to this mutual implication of social constructions might be to conclude that the inquiry is thus ‘impossible’, and one of the differences between psychology and psychoanalysis then starts to appear; for psychology has traditionally insisted that the contradictions that inhere in the reflexive implication of researcher and researched can be ignored, resolved or transcended – that it can be made possible (e.g. Finlay and Gough, 2003; cf. Mather, 1997) – while psychoanalysis in its most radical forms has tended to draw the conclusion that this ‘impossibility’ lies at the very core of the subject (e.g. Freud, 1937; Malone, 2000).

The double construction of subject and object (whether of theoretical or empirical research) operates alongside a third aspect of construction, which is that the conceptual apparatus that we bring to bear on subjectivity itself is artifice (if not also artifice necessary to live in a world that has itself been made by human beings rather than being the product of an omniscient super-intelligent designer). Psychoanalysis and psychology are conceptual apparatuses that form subjects of which they speak, and also the kinds of subjects that speak about the objects they circle around.

The relationship between psychoanalysis and psychology is marked by differences over conceptual focus and methodological grounding, over ontological and epistemological claims. There has been a shift in the terms of debate between psychoanalytic and psychological work over the last century such that methodology and associated epistemological issues have come to assume priority over ontological questions, over the way concepts are defined and then amenable to translation from one sphere of work to the other. This shift has been driven, in part, by the development of psychology from being an enterprise primarily concerned with ‘naming the mind’ (Danziger, 1997) to becoming an academic and professional discipline defined almost entirely by method (Rose, 1985).

The production of genealogical and reflexive ‘histories’ of psychology in the last thirty years has been made possible by the emergence of a nascent tradition of ‘constructionist’ work that brings together once again, but now in a more complex way, conceptual and methodological aspects of inquiry (e.g. Richards, 1996; Rose, 1985). It has thus been possible to interrogate anew ontological and epistemological foundations of modern subjectivity, and thus to explore the historical nature of psychological (and psychoanalytic) theory and practice. One might say that the emergence of the alternative constructionist tradition provides the ‘conditions of possibility’ or, at the very least, a ‘surface of emergence’ for new discourses about psychology and psychoanalysis that do not take the objects of those different spheres of inquiry as given (Blackman, 1994; Foucault, 1969/1972; Hook, 2005).

To treat psychoanalytic clinical practice as a component of the broader ‘psy-complex’, for example, enables us to destabilize the ‘truth effects’ of psychoanalysis while taking seriously the production of particular forms of subjectivity (Miller and Rose, 1988, 1994). Both psychology and psychoanalysis have a peculiar power in modern society to produce what they find, and to do so within particular institutions and cultural practices such that they are able to incite, mobilize and recruit human subjects who will testify to the ‘truth’ of their investigative procedures and their determinate knowledge. The different spheres of inquiry are not mere theoretical frames for making sense of human experience, then, but should each be treated as a conceptual apparatus which is tied to specific modes of inquiry and self-confirmation.

At the same time the constructionist movement in modern psychology goes well beyond the ‘cognitive turn’ (cf. Talvitie and Tiitinen, 2006), and that movement has opened up a useful but still limited space for addressing the nature of our knowledge of subjectivity (e.g. Gergen, 1985). The relationship between the conceptual apparatuses of psychology and psychoanalysis is becoming an increasingly urgent question for adherents of each apparatus. This chapter sets out some of the coordinates for the emerging debates over the role of psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice in psychology and elaborates some ways of mapping the conditions of possibility for the emergence of psychoanalysis inside psychology, now as part of ‘our’ own conceptual apparatus for defining and treating modern subjectivity.

Freud and the rest

Psychology undergraduate textbooks in the English-speaking world (and then those produced by US publishers in other languages) tend to represent Freud's (1953–1974) writings as rather archaic remainders in the distant history of the discipline. Here his work is systematically mis-represented, corralled into a scientific paradigm that he questioned and then judged according to criteria he refused. Psychoanalysis thus functions as the exemplary ‘unscientific’ approach to understanding the individual while, at the same time, ages and stages of development are described in the same textbooks and attributed to Freud (Richards, 1989). The rhetorical motif of ‘Freud/Jung/Adler’ (with the series continued sometimes with a few later analysts) is then taken up by many of those who teach psychoanalytic ‘personality theory’ to psychology students; and although Jung and Adler broke from Freud and explicitly disowned psychoanalysis (to found their own brands of ‘analytical psychology’ and ‘individual psychology’), and even though the different theories must all be revised by students for examination, psychoanalysis is still often treated as a compressed mass of notions ranging from ‘penis envy’ to the ‘collective unconscious’ and the ‘inferiority complex’.

The case of Jung (1983) is particularly relevant to a consideration of the relationship between psychology and psychoanalysis, all the more so when questions of ‘culture’ are to the fore in such research. Jung not only provides theoretical resources for assessing ‘personality types’, but he also claims to embed these individual categories in anthropological discoveries concerning the commonalities and differences between cultures (e.g. Jung, 1989). There has even been some interest in Jung's writings among the newer traditions of ‘constructionist’ theory in psychology – though, as we shall see, these are most strange bedfellows. It is worth rehearsing some of the key theoretical compass points of Freudian psychoanalysis and differentiating them from this tradition, with which Freud's work is commonly confused, before turning to more recent attempts to engage with psychoanalytic theory in psychology. These questions are particularly important given the popularity of Jungian conceptions of self and culture with ‘new age’ therapists in the English-speaking world who are unaware of the reactionary history of Jung's writing.

Jung was the first President of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), founded in 1910 by Freud and his followers in Nuremberg. Freud had proposed Jung as ‘permanent president’ of the IPA, but was relieved when Jung eventually resigned after three years of presidency (Gay, 1988). When Jung broke from the IPA, he made it clear that he was developing something that was quite different from psychoanalysis; but why was Freud so pleased that the differences had at last been clarified, above and beyond being delighted to be rid of ‘the brutal holy Jung and his pious parrots’ (Gay, 1988: 241)?

First, psychoanalysis is concerned primarily with questions of ‘form’ rather than of ‘content’. The Oedipus complex, for example, does not prescribe roles for women and men so that each child can really be in love with mother and want to kill father. The ‘father’ and ‘mother’ are, rather, functions that may be physically embodied in the same individual care-giver or distributed among many others. What are most important are the formal properties of the relationship; the infant's love for its first object is broken by another figure so that the infant may be inducted into wider social relationships (Freud, 1933). Jung, on the other hand, filled out the formal structures with collective material from mythology that is imagined to be present as content to each individual; and so a Jungian learns the content of myths in order that each person can be read as if they were a pack of living tarot card characters.

Second, psychoanalysis focuses on the disjunction between consciousness and the unconscious; the unconscious is not conceived as being like another version of consciousness that can be accessed and so harmonized with what we are immediately aware of, and the unconscious does not contain a centre that can be detected so that real intentions can be brought to the surface. If dreams are, as Freud said, a royal road to an understanding of the unconscious, it is because dreams help us track around the boundaries of the unconscious, not because the road actually leads into it so we can see it as it is (Freud, 1900/1999). Against this, Jung relies on a number of holistic assumptions in which there is a unity of self, and potentially there is unity between consciousness and layers of the personal and collective unconscious.

Third, psychoanalysis treats every appeal to divine forces as a sign of pathology, as symptomatic, and religious ideas are usually seen as illusions or delusions that provide varying measures of comfort or security (even if some practising psychoanalysts modify this stance in order not to pathologize religious belief). The questioning and dismantling of all ‘ideals’ makes psychoanalysis necessarily atheist, and its clinical and political practice arose as part of the tradition of the Western Enlightenment: reason allied with scientific inquiry (Freud, 1930 [1929]). Jung, on the other hand, sought to ‘reconnect’ individuals with a domain of spiritual experience, and this is a domain which combines what he sees as essential and universal in life (Dalal, 1988).

Jung's ‘analytical psychology’, then, was not at all compatible with the laboratory-experimental paradigm that governed, and still predominates, in mainstream academic and professional psychology. Psychology is neither monolithic nor immutable, however, and changing relationships between various currents of work have provided some points of connection between psychology and analytical psychology. The discipline of psychology is a conceptual apparatus that has increasingly shifted from questions of ontology (a domain of inquiry in which there could be some dialogue with psychoanalytic ideas) to questions of epistemology, and so increasingly to attempts to circumscribe the conditions in which we make any claims to have discovered underlying mental processes (i.e. to methodological debates endemically hostile to psychoanalysis). The interchange between psychology and psychoanalysis closed down – and this is then the point at which it might be possible to say that psychoanalysis became the ‘repressed other’ of psychology (Burman, 2008) – but the increasingly mechanistic character of psychology also incited humanistic and phenomenological responses; the Jungian (non-psychoanalytic) invitation to attend to content, self and spirituality was thus congenial to some critics of mainstream psychology inside the discipline, and this is now still the setting in which some few ‘constructionists’ are also sympathetic to Jungian ideas (e.g. Jones, 2003; Olson, 2006).

The departure of Jung from the IPA was an opportunity for Freud to clarify psychoanalysis of a number of temptations in clinical practice. The temptations include: to decipher underlying content (and then, for example, to interpr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Psychology After Critique
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series foreword
• Series preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: psychology after psychoanalysis
• 1 Psychoanalytic theory and psychology: conditions of possibility for clinical and cultural practice
• 2 Psychoanalysis and critical psychology
• 3 The place of transference in psychosocial research
• 4 Freud’s culture
• 5 Losing psychoanalysis in translation
• 6 Marxism, psychoanalysis and the state: lessons from Slovenia
• References
• Index